Book Details

Book Description

If you have an osCommerce-based online business, you need this book. Packed with expert guidance on all aspects of building a better online, this book will make your store stand out from the crowd.

All approaches and techniques described here are proven to have worked well for successful osCommerce-based online businesses among the, over 650, all around the globe with which the author has been actively involved as developer, project manager, or online business consultant.

osCommerce is an open-source e-commerce solution written in PHP and MySQL that can be set up on various platforms. More than 10,000 businesses and sole traders all around the world benefit from its features and flexibility. The importance of the osCommerce community consisting of over 100,000 can not be stressed enough as this is where both online merchants and web developers can communicate and find solutions. There are many "contributions" â€” modules for osCommerce that further extend its functionality â€” making it suitable for almost every business's requirements.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Increasing Profits and Sales with osCommerce

Why osCommerce?

What is the Book About?

Profits First

The Strategy to Profit

Summary

Chapter 2: Advertising an Online Store

What can be Advertised?

How to Advertise

Summary

Chapter 3: Search Engine Optimization

Why SEO?

SEO When Switching to osCommerce from an Existing Website

Understanding External and Internal SEO

Hiring an SEO Specialist

Tracking SEO Campaign Results

Summary

Chapter 4: Dynamic Content to Improve Sales

Dynamic Content: What and Why?

Different Types of Dynamic Content in osCommerce

Summary

Chapter 5: Building Customer Confidence

Ensuring Server and Database Safety

Information about the Business

Customer Information

Product Catalog

Placing Orders

Order Processing

Summary

Chapter 6: Design to Sell

Main Principles of E-Commerce Design

Design that Helps Sales

Design Matches Products

Design Matches Target Audience

Design Compatibility

Multicultural and Multilingual Designs

Design Recommendations

Fast Design

Bra﻿nding

Updating osCommerce Design

Summary

Chapter 7: Improving Product Catalog

Making Navigation More Obvious

Product Listing

Search

Product Information

Going International

Summary

Chapter 8: Increasing Order Value

Increasing Order Values for Customers

Increasing Order Values for Store Owners

Offers Being Reasonable

Increasing Profits and Not Necessarily Order Totals

Selling Related Products Together

Minimum Order Amount Strategy

Complex Products

Design of the Shopping Cart Page

Summary

Chapter 9: Increasing the Turnover via Promotions and Special Offers

Which Products to Promote

Recommended Retail Price and Purchase Price

Special Prices

Quantity Discounts

Discounts Based on Order Value

Discount Coupons and Gift Vouchers

Rebates

Avoiding an Addiction to Discounts

Winning Market Share

Summary

Chapter 10: Improving Conversion Rates and Customer Experience

Why Improve Conversion Rates?

Conversion Rates in osCommerce

Paths that Convert Visitors into Customers

Page Elements that Improve Conversion Rates

Wish Lists and Quotations

Payment Methods

Error Handling and Confirmations

Customer Account

Back End Improvements

Summary

Chapter 11: Understanding and Using Reports

Tracking Visitors

Tracking Sales

Tracking Stock

Tracking Customers

Summary

Chapter 12: Repeat Customers

Why Repeat Customers?

Customers and Repeat Customers

How to Keep in Touch with Customers

Loyal Customers

Summary

Chapter 13: Afterword

What You Will Learn

Calculate and monitor profits

Monitor and track efficiency of advertising campaigns

Optimize your osCommerce online store for search engines

Internal and External Search Engine Optimization (SEO):

Getting popular on search engines

Web page optimization

Structure and dynamic content

Keyword selection

Back-linking strategies

Make your SEO campaigns pay off

Superb ideas for appealing store design

Reach profitable new markets by fine-tuning your product catalog

Best practices for product listing and product information pages

Build and maintain customer confidence

Run a properly planned promotion campaign

Use and extend the reporting facility of osCommerce

Practical insights on creating custom reports

Improve your process and efficiency while maintaining business profitability

Convert customers into repeat customers

Detailed Table of Contents:

In Chapter 1 you will see a brief introduction to osCommerce, and learn how to calculate and monitor profits. Attracting visitors to your website is an essential task to gear the business up.

In Chapter 2 we review several ways to advertise and get visitors to your site, including: organic search, banners, pop-ups, link exchange, affiliate programs, newsletters, forums and blogs, and online directories. This chapter has extensive insights on how to track the efficiency (and other variables) of an advertisement campaign.

Chapter 3 shows you how to race to the top of search engine result pages. You will learn methods, techniques, and actions to make your store easily accessible to and indexed by search engines. If you decide to keep ahead of the game and hire a professional SEO consultant, you will want to dig deeper into this chapter where we review aspects of hiring professional SEO consultants and show how to track SEO campaign results. This chapter familiarizes you with the good and bad search engines practices and helps you find which keywords work best

Chapter 4 concentrates on solutions and practices that help authoring original dynamic content, for your users and customers to post content online. We review the benefits of using dynamic content solutions like CMS, forums, blogs, and feeds, and their integration with osCommerce.

Chapter 5 gives you insight on why it is important to build customer confidence and how to do it. We review ways to improve your online store and business model to make customers more confident about placing orders online with your online store. A good design often spells the difference between failure and success.

Chapter 6 covers effective design of an online store; here you will learn to optimize design for different types of customers and customize it to match your corporate identity. We discuss common-sense approaches to developing design templates and also tackle practical issues like caching and improving page loading speed using database and PHP script optimization to ensure a smoother customer experience.

In Chapter 7, you will learn how sales can be improved in osCommerce by improving your product catalog. It concentrates on improving navigation and making customer interaction intuitive and friendly.

In Chapter 8 we discuss how and why order values can be increased, and what effect this has on the turnover and profit figures. It shows how to increase order values by putting both the customer and the online merchant in a win-win situation. Understand the dynamics of cross-linking products, creating product bundles, configurable products, and employing the minimum order amount strategy.

Chapter 9 covers how to run a properly planned promotion campaign, while keeping an eye on operational costs. The turnover of an online store can be increased by increasing its market shareâ€”this chapter shows your how. From grabbing customers to maximizing what you get from your suppliers, running affiliate programs, and B2B programs for trade customers.

Chapter 10 shows you how important it is to monitor and constantly improve the conversion rates of online business, and analyzes how conversion rates affect profitability of the business. It shows how to improve the checkout process in osCommerce, and how to utilize individual customer accounts to increase sales.

In Chapter 11 we further explorer monitoring of the performance of the website by creating and of course understanding various reports, and using statistical information to improve the efficiency of an osCommerce-based online business. In this chapter you will get an insiderâ€™s understanding of using and extending the reporting facility of osCommerce, including: reports to plan your advertisement budget, re-arrange advertisement campaigns, track and forecast sale figures, find bestselling and most profitable products, manufacturers, and categories and highlight certain products by marking them as featured, locate best-buying customers and reward them, track stock and ease re-ordering of the most popular products from suppliers, track customers and use previous order history for marketing purposes, send targeted newsletters to customers, and even plan your online store's net profit figures and its profitability.

In Chapter 12 you will learn how the online store can benefit from having repeat customers, and how to convert customers into repeat customers. This chapter shows how to increase this conversion rate by providing loyal customers additional benefits, like a loyalty points, referral bonuses, etc.

Authors

Vadym Gurevych

Vadym Gurevych holds a Masters of Software Development degree from Kharkov National Technical University (Ukraine) and has been creating commercial software products for businesses for 10 years. His interest in learning more about the management and business side of the process led him to join the DataLink UK Ltd. in 2001 as Project Manager. Based in the UK, Datalink (which also trades as Holbi) concentrates on providing a wide range of bespoke e-commerce solutions to its local and international customers. In those days Vadym didn’t imagine managing open-source projects, but since 2002 he has been creating osCommerce-based sites and this has become Datalink’s main source of revenue since 2004. Now Managing Director of DataLink UK Ltd., Vadym is responsible for strategy development and business decisions, and for ensuring that his team of 30 provides customers with the most efficient solutions. Since he finds it exciting and sometimes challenging, he still personally supervises major sales deals and manages major projects. He has been happily married to his wife Elena for almost eight years now, and also finds time to write/maintain a popular blog, osCommerceBlog.com, and contribute to DatalinkUK.com and Holbi.co.uk. Vadym writes: “Talking to a customer, finding out the best solution for the business, making sure that solution is properly implemented, and seeing the business improving – is what brings satisfaction and makes me happy about the way my career has developed to date.”

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Increasing Profits and Sales with osCommerce

Why osCommerce?

What is the Book About?

Profits First

The Strategy to Profit

Summary

Chapter 2: Advertising an Online Store

What can be Advertised?

How to Advertise

Summary

Chapter 3: Search Engine Optimization

Why SEO?

SEO When Switching to osCommerce from an Existing Website

Understanding External and Internal SEO

Hiring an SEO Specialist

Tracking SEO Campaign Results

Summary

Chapter 4: Dynamic Content to Improve Sales

Dynamic Content: What and Why?

Different Types of Dynamic Content in osCommerce

Summary

Chapter 5: Building Customer Confidence

Ensuring Server and Database Safety

Information about the Business

Customer Information

Product Catalog

Placing Orders

Order Processing

Summary

Chapter 6: Design to Sell

Main Principles of E-Commerce Design

Design that Helps Sales

Design Matches Products

Design Matches Target Audience

Design Compatibility

Multicultural and Multilingual Designs

Design Recommendations

Fast Design

Bra﻿nding

Updating osCommerce Design

Summary

Chapter 7: Improving Product Catalog

Making Navigation More Obvious

Product Listing

Search

Product Information

Going International

Summary

Chapter 8: Increasing Order Value

Increasing Order Values for Customers

Increasing Order Values for Store Owners

Offers Being Reasonable

Increasing Profits and Not Necessarily Order Totals

Selling Related Products Together

Minimum Order Amount Strategy

Complex Products

Design of the Shopping Cart Page

Summary

Chapter 9: Increasing the Turnover via Promotions and Special Offers

Which Products to Promote

Recommended Retail Price and Purchase Price

Special Prices

Quantity Discounts

Discounts Based on Order Value

Discount Coupons and Gift Vouchers

Rebates

Avoiding an Addiction to Discounts

Winning Market Share

Summary

Chapter 10: Improving Conversion Rates and Customer Experience

Why Improve Conversion Rates?

Conversion Rates in osCommerce

Paths that Convert Visitors into Customers

Page Elements that Improve Conversion Rates

Wish Lists and Quotations

Payment Methods

Error Handling and Confirmations

Customer Account

Back End Improvements

Summary

Chapter 11: Understanding and Using Reports

Tracking Visitors

Tracking Sales

Tracking Stock

Tracking Customers

Summary

Chapter 12: Repeat Customers

Why Repeat Customers?

Customers and Repeat Customers

How to Keep in Touch with Customers

Loyal Customers

Summary

Chapter 13: Afterword

Book Details

ISBN 139781847192028

Paperback428 pages

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